Honduras

Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, is vulnerable to climate change due to its high exposure to climate-related hazards (hurricanes, tropical storms, floods, droughts, landslides) that devastate crops and critical infrastructure. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch destroyed an estimated 70 percent of the country’s crops and infrastructure, causing more than 10,000 deaths and $3 billion in damage, significantly setting back Honduras’ development process. Honduras has a high rural population (more than 50 percent), of which 65 percent lives in poverty. The rural poor depend on rainfed agriculture as their principle livelihood and are concentrated in the southern and western regions, known as the Dry Corridor, where food insecurity has become a recurrent issue; 58 percent of children under five suffer from chronic undernutrition. In urban areas, migration from rural areas and population growth have pushed settlements into hazard-prone zones that lack water management systems, resulting in frequent flooding and water scarcity in major cities and towns including,Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, Choloma and Tela (USAID Climate Risk Profile, 2017).

This section provides a summary of key natural hazards and their associated socioeconomic impacts in a given country. And it allows quick evaluation of most vulnerable areas through the spatial comparison of natural hazard data with development data, thereby identifying exposed livelihoods and natural systems.